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Handle Disconnected Participants with React Hooks and the Twilio API

Build a Video Chat App with Twilio and Gatsby

We need to handle disconnection to avoid frozen screens and black boxes when people leave the chat. This needs to be handled both for the local participant and for remote participants.

In this lesson, we'll create a `disconnect` action that will use Twilio's `disconnect` function that will properly disconnect all connections to their service as well as set the application state back to the default state.

Instructor: [0:01] Last thing we want to do is handle disconnection, both allowing the local participant to click the Leave Room button to exit, and handling what happens when someone who's remote, ends up leaving the chat.

[0:12] To do that, we're going to update useTwilioVideo.js, and down toward the bottom here, we're going to add another helper next to Start Video, called Leave Room. This is going to dispatch an action with the type of disconnect.

[0:29] What this disconnection action is going to do, this is how the local participant is going to leave the room. When we process this, we're going to come up to our reducer, and we're going to check for the action type of disconnect, so case.disconnect.

[0:46] When this happens, we want to do two things. First, we want to see if a room exists, and if one does, we're going to call state room.disconnect. This is a built-in Twilio method that will disconnect from Twilio entirely and shut down all the things we need to do like local tracks and any API connections.

[1:04] Once we've got that done, we're going to return the default state to bring our app back to the home page, no token, no name, no room, just back on the home page able to join a new room.

[1:14] Next, we need to actually use this. We're going to add this as something that you can get from the local hook. We'll add it to our returned object.

[1:24] Inside Video Display, we'll get Leave Room out of the custom hook, and then we're going to add support for a button here. We've already got the state and we can say, "If there's a room, then we want to show a button." The button that we're going to show is going to have a class name of Leave Room and an OnClick of Leave Room.

[1:47] We'll just let people know what it means by adding some text that says, "Leave Room." If we save this, what we can do now is come out here join a call and we'll see a button that says, "Leave room." If I click it, immediately turns off my webcam and brings me back to the home page.

[2:04] Next, we want to handle how a participant leaves. Back in our useTwilioVideo, we'll go into the handle remote participant. Inside handle remote participant toward the bottom where we're handling actions, we're going to add a new one for participant.onTrack unsubscribed.

[2:22] In this one, we'll get a track and we want to track detach so that actually pulls it out of the DOM. We will say, "For each elements, we want to straight up, remove it. We want it gone." We also want to check for the container which we'll get by using get element by ID.

[2:42] Remember, we're inside of the handle remote participants, which means we have access to the element ID which we've set here.

[2:51] We're grabbing that container, and then we're going to check if it exists. If there's a container, we're going to remove it, container.remove. We want to completely remove this from all participant from our DOM whenever they unsubscribe or leave a room. To test this, we can pull up our extra windows again.

[3:09] I'll join as Jason. I'll open another window, join the same room as not Jason. Now we can see that I have two connections, but if I leave, I immediately disappear from this room. However, there is one problem. Because of the way that this works, if I close the window instead of clicking the leave button, this video will freeze.

[3:38] My local track is still connected, but this one's frozen. It'll take a long time for that to realize that it's completely disconnected. They do that to keep the stable connection. If you accidentally disconnect, you have a blip in your Internet connection.

[3:51] We don't want the whole thing to shut down, but in this case, we want it to close down a lot faster than it currently is. What we're going to do is we're going to add a check for whether or not the window has been closed. If the window has closed, we're going to unload. We can do that by going into the Video Display.

[4:11] We're going to get into this useEffect. We'll say, "We want to add an event listener." We're going to add this right to the window. We're going to listen for beforeunload. Beforeunload is an event that fires right when somebody clicks the X in a tab or tries to navigate away.

[4:28] What we're going to say is, if someone unloads this window or this tab, we want to leave the room first. We want to make sure that we've actually disconnected. Now to make sure that we don't pile up a bunch of event listeners, we're also going to return a callback.

[4:42] This is what gets fired whenever this component unmounts. That's how useEffect works. Inside of this, we're just going to run window remove event listener. We will set beforeunload and leave room.

[4:58] To make sure we avoid the React warning, we're going add leave room to the useEffect dependency array. Now, if we go back out and I open a new window and join this room, what should happen is if I come in here and I immediately close the window, I'll immediately be disconnected.

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Build a Video Chat App with Twilio and Gatsby

Handle Disconnected Participants with React Hooks and the Twilio API

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